The Story of Solutions: Why Bigger is Not Better

For five years Annie Leonard and the folks from the innovative Story of Stuff Project have been creating compact educational videos explaining complicated ideas in a very accessible and easy to understand format. One of their most recent short films, The Story of Solutions, is perhaps the most hopeful and inspiring in the series.

Better Not Bigger

The nine minute video simply chronicles some basic flaws with never-ending growth and rampant consumerism, and offers up many real world solutions that already exist — from thriving cooperative business networks and rising worker ownership, to bike sharing, collaborative consumption, and radically restructuring not a bigger, but a better and more sustainable economy. This is how the filmmakers describe the message shaping their movie:

“The Story of Solutions…explores how we can move our economy in a more sustainable and just direction, starting with orienting ourselves toward a new goal. In the current ‘Game of More’, we’re told to cheer a growing economy – more roads, more malls, more Stuff! – even though our health indicators are worsening, income inequality is growing and polar icecaps are melting. But what if we changed the point of the game? What if the goal of our economy wasn’t more, but better – better health, better jobs and a better chance to survive on the planet? Shouldn’t that be what winning means?”

Bikeability / Walkability

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